On Sunday night the Justice Department was granted access to view the House Intelligence Committee memo known as the ‘Nunes Memo’.  In unusual timing, last night FBI Director Christopher Wray went to the secure facility (SCIF) in the basement of the House of Representatives to view the content of the House Intel Committee memo.
Today, the FBI releases an announcement saying Deputy FBI Director Andrew “Andy” McCabe has stepped down (been removed) from his position effective immediately.

Narrative engineers immediately began applying a typical spin to the announcement away from recent discoveries of corrupt behavior of the FBI, and inferring President Trump’s admonishments of Deputy Director McCabe were the impetus for removal.

Via NBC [Andrew McCabe] … served a brief stint as acting director of the bureau after Trump fired ex-FBI chief James Comey, will remain on the payroll until March, when he is eligible to retire with full benefits, NBC said. He had been expected to leave.

Trump and some Republicans in Congress have accused McCabe of political bias, citing his role at the FBI during investigations related to Hillary Clinton and Trump. They question his role in the Clinton email probe and the investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign coordinated with the Kremlin.
Trump did not answer when asked by reporters Monday afternoon if he knew about McCabe’s move.  (read more)

It is interesting, perhaps important, to note a few things within this latest development and overlay them.
♦First, in February of 2017 we drew attention to a story of how Deputy Director Andrew McCabe approached then chief-of-staff Reince Priebus to state that the FBI saw no evidence of any Trump-Russia collusion, and the reports within media about leaks from the intelligence community toward that narrative were based on nothing.

reince-preibus-mccabe(link)

Priebus asked if the FBI could then knock down all of these media reports by issuing a statement outlining the same.  After some quick communication with FBI Director Comey, Deputy Director McCabe responded back to Priebus saying no, the FBI couldn’t issue that statement.
Within a day CNN was reporting that Reince Priebus tried to “pressure” Andrew McCabe and James Comey.   Obviously that story to CNN came directly from McCabe and/or Comey.   This example of FBI leaking to media (in 2017) is contained within a book that was just mentioned yesterday.

♦Secondly, it is not coincidental that now the Justice Department has had an opportunity to preview the Nunes memo content, we begin seeing leaks about it in the New York Times.
The Black Hat operatives within the DOJ and FBI are desperate to get out ahead of the stories.
Think about it.  The Nunes memo was available to congress for over a week, and not a single -substantive- material leak came out.  Yet, within HOURS of the Justice Department having access to the memo, the New York Times is writing about specific details contained within the memo:

WASHINGTON — A secret, highly contentious Republican memo reveals that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein approved an application to extend surveillance of a former Trump campaign associate shortly after taking office last spring, according to three people familiar with it.

The renewal shows that the Justice Department under President Trump saw reason to believe that the associate, Carter Page, was acting as a Russian agent. But the reference to Mr. Rosenstein’s actions in the memo — a much-disputed document that paints the investigation into Russian election meddling as tainted from the start — indicates that Republicans may be moving to seize on his role as they seek to undermine the inquiry.

The memo’s primary contention is that F.B.I. and Justice Department officials failed to adequately explain to an intelligence court judge in initially seeking a warrant for surveillance of Mr. Page that they were relying in part on research by an investigator, Christopher Steele, that had been financed by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.  (read more)


More on that angle a bit later….

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